4TheNET

By now, I'm sure it's public knowledge the difficulties this ISP encountered during September because of the issues faced with Aspire Internet.

I'm a great believer that a company should never be judged by problems that occur, but by the way they react. In this instance, I urge you not to touch 4theNet with a very long bargepole.

So, a large swathe of customers lose connection. Not ideal, but these things happen. For the first 48-72hrs, the phone is answered as they field the initial questions with vague answers. Then, nothing. For 5, yep 5 days, the phone is unanswered with no updates on the answerphone system. Requests for information go unanswered. That, is unforgiveable. Even if you wanted a MAC to be issued, there were no means to contact them to get it. Even OFCOM (who were equally useless) washed their hands of the whole saga.

It eventually took over 2 weeks for a connection to be restored. "It was completely out of our hands" they've bleated. A monkies I don't give - it's 4theNet I have the deal with.

To rub salt into the wounds, the connection which I've now been left with since the 'switchover' is easily 25-33% slower to the one I had before the whole sorry saga. Suffice to say, I'll be looking to move provider immediately.

Like I said before, I appreciate that stuff happens. I can deal with that. The way that 4theNet responded to the event was shocking and, IMHO, shouldn't be allowed to carry on in the fashion they have.

Last Thursday (8 days ago) my internet connection was lost along with lordelpus' connection. I presume all customers of this ISP are suffering the same catastrophic failure of connection.

Hidden away on their support page is a message stating that something very bad has gone wrong whilst transferring to a faster network (LOL), but of course it is nothing to do with them.

What sort of incompetence could cause this?

Why haven't they emailed/phoned me to apologise, explain? My support tickets are unanswered.

I am just wondering how long this is going to continue.

I have had an internet connection for 12 years and never had such poor service.This company has left me with NO broadband for over a week .They will not answer the phone but simply leave messages on their phone line.They have failed to deal with a MAC request and I have had to report them to OFCOM.I am a doctor who has had suffered immensely without my internet connection to allow me to access patient data from my home--have had to stay at my surgery.Despite having told the company of my difficulties they have still done nothing to help--I find this inhuman.Had another outage a couple of weeks ago again with no explanation or apology from the company.Had issues with download speeds too which were very poor.